The osFree project has published its first screenshot. "osFree is an open source free (non-commercial) software development project. Goals of the projects are to replace all (or most) of OS/2's subsystems with open-source analogues. The base compatibility system is OS/2 Warp 4 (Merlin), but that doesn't mean we won't be supporting features of newer versions of OS/2 like OS/2 WarpServer for e-business and eComStation by Serenity Systems."

Why the sarcasm? This is OS News, right? You enjoy OS articles, and you presumably are interested in people actually cutting OS code? Maybe not.

OS/2 like DOS or CP/M? Is this a case of "I don't use it so I'll bash it".

Try the eCS Live CD - if you cannot comprehend that OS/2 is a family of products that stretches back a couple of decades and is not at version 1.0 anymore then you probably don't understand that Windows XP is not Windows 3.1, or that Linux 2.6.x is not something that some guys put together in a lab in the 1960's... OS/2 has progressed. As has Windows, *nix, Mac, etc.

It's getting really tiring having to counter trolls whenever a minority OS is mentioned. All it takes is a sniff of OS/2, AmigaOS, Haiku, RiscOS, SkyOS, etc, and the ignorant brigade come out from under their bridges.

What it really is, is a question of what real use all of that talent is going to be, when they're putting their time into rewriting and upgrading obsolete systems that have fewer users each year.

Yes, I know that it must be fun for them. so as long as it's a hobby, fine. But the significance of it all is minor, at best. A few thousand people will play with it for a while, and then go on to something else.

Some of these systems are truly dead. They serve no modern purpose. The commercial users have either gone, or are in the process of going, and will not stay or come back.

It's not ignorance to make note of all of this, and question its usefulness. It IS ignorant to pretend that the people who question it are to ones who are trolls.

If you think that your viewpoint is valid, then so is ours.

I read so many posts where the person thinks that with just a bit more work, some hopelessly outclassed OS is going to make a comeback. It's not. The vast amount of work required will never emerge because most programmers realize that there will be no market for their work, and so stay away.

This is the same problem Linux faces. There are too many distro's that have 100 or even less people using, and swearing by them. If that effort went into a more mainstream product without all of the hysterics we've seen in the community overs the years, Linux might have a much bigger share now.

Yes, I know that it must be fun for them. so as long as it's a hobby, fine. But the significance of it all is minor, at best. A few thousand people will play with it for a while, and then go on to something else.

The above is true of just about everything which is discussed on this web site, including variants of BSD, Solaris, and Linux.

Then again, this web site is for OS enthusiasts, and mainstream practicality is often not a stated goal at all. This is something commercially-oriented readers need to understand...

Du you consider newspapers dead because of radio?
Do you consider radio dead, because of TV?
Do you consider newspapers, radio and TV dead because of the Internet?

Good ol' books, newspapers, radio and TV works fine with the Internet.

So no, they are not dead.

New technology does not mean that old technology is obsolete, nor dead. It just means that they will be used for other tasks.

And OS/2 for an instance is - from a technical point of view - still superior in many areas compared with Windows, Linux and even Mac OS X. OS/2 has also several drawbacks, but this is true for most OS'es (I yet have to find the perfect one).

I was not questionning your right to challenge the uesfulness of any particular OS. However when people's quotes degenerate into ridiculous comments such as why not us CP/M or DOS instead, then frankly it adds little or nothing to the discussion. This is an OS forum for OS enthusiasts. If somebody did come along and decide to do a free version of CP/M, then let them, say I.

My point was that simply because an OS is a minority OS and is not one that you (generally, not you specifically) use, does not mean that it has no value. And if people are willing to dedicate *their* spare time to making a free clone, good for them. I'm not convinced that they'll succeed, but why lambast them for trying? Must everything free be *nix derived? Should Haiku be scrapped? No, of course not. In variety and diversity lies strength, and good ideas can drop out of the most unlikely places.

Incidentally, OS/2 is far from being obsolete. It's got a few good years in it yet. If it were, Serenity Systems would have gone out of business a while back, and IBM would have stopped selling OS/2 support too.

If the inference was that I was tainting you with an accusation of ignorance, then I do apologise for that. I have no wish to cause offence to fellow readers of this forum. I hope that you in turn can see the other point of view.

I thought that by 'replacing subsystems' they meant replacing modules, while keeping the majority of the proprietary system running untill everything can be replaced. Instead, they go from the grounds up. Possibly not the approach I prefer to see; too big projects with a small audience run aground like this.

Because some people out there want to have an open-source alternative to an operating system that may never be open-sourced. OS/2 was technically superior to what Microsoft had at that time, and even possibly still is. The reason it failed was a combination of Microsoft dominance and IBM incompetence. Its future (at IBM) was cut short. But that is no reason to call it 'shitty'. Your attack on the operating system has no basis whatsoever.

"why even bother?"
Who died and made you ruler of what people spend their time on?
Because they feel like it? It's an interesting challenge? Who cares, it's not for us to tell them what to do.
I heard the previously mentioned Ignorance Brigade is looking for volunteers, you might want to join.

OS/2 was a REALLY powerful os... Think a stable and fast windows(Presentation Manger) with no 640k barrier unlike win 3.11 and much faster and stable then win 95... The only flaw was os/2 couldn't handle a reset button.. ;-) Seriously, you pressed the reset button on an os/2 box and be rest assured you have to run chkdsk! ;-) Imagine if BeOS had been released when win 3.11 was out.. That's what OS/2 was like in terms of speed and stability..

It's a protected mode OS/2 with multitasking and good support for threading. It also featured an impressive Amiga-like GUI. Think Win95 but stable and fast and with a better GUI/built in scripting(Rexx), proper CLI etc.

Some people (mostly people who never used it) seem to be under the misaprehension that OS/2 was a bland OS but it featured a lot of cutting edge tech well before other OSes implimented them (JAVA, TCP/IP dialer as standard, OpenDoc).

OS/2 Warp 4 came out just before Windows 95, and I was amazed at the difference between both systems on the same machine. OS/2 was in a completely different league, and it never showed one sign of instability on my machine. Things were totally intuitive to do. Even if I had never done them before.

However.... I dumped it in favour of Windows 95.

At the time, I was one of those users who "THOUGHT" I had to use Windows because everyone else done so.

I was young and naive, do not hassle me out for it, I since know better.

The UI had queing issues, causing it to 'hang'. Other than that, it wasn't like DOS at all. It took years for Windows to reach a similar level, and even then the desktop under Windows isn't nearly as nice.

Being an old OS/2 advocate, I'm in the 'let it go away like the Amiga' crowd. (Of course, there are plenty of current Amiga fans, so what do I know!)

Currently, everything seems to be either Unix, Unix-like, or repeating the lessons learned in Unix (that would be Windows). So, why not just use a *nix and be done with it?

OS/2 was a big clunky OS that reminded you that its owners liked to build operating systems for big old mainframes. It barely seemed to fit on a PC.
It was way ahead of its time and could be a pain in the kneck to install. I recall video drivers running at ring zero and crashing the whole OS.
Once you had it installed correctly it would run forever and was as solid as a rock.
There was very little software for OS/2 but it could run Windows programs.

OS/2 Warp 4 could be made to run on a 4MB machine (as you could completely drop the GUI and run it using a freeware third-party text shell), and its resource usage has always been significantly less than Windows NT and its descendants.

OS/2 Video drivers do not run at Ring 0 -- you must be thinging of Windows NT 4?

OS/2 is lacking in certain types of software, but the fact that it runs DOS and Windows stuff makes up for some of that lack, putting it ahead of all but Windows and Linux in terms of available software. And maybe MacOSX, though it's a specialized case.

OS/2 was and is an efficient OS with a minimal footprint on the system.

OS 3.X could easily run in 4 MB of RAM while NT required at least 16 and the same for Win95.

Software could be a bit problematic, but most major applications got ported to OS/2 one way or the other. And those who weren't could still run due to the great support for DOS and Windows applications. Especially the DOS support was great. Much better than anything I've seen later, apart from DOSBox

I tried FreeDOS a few times in the past and could never make it install and boot correctly. The last time was probably about one year ago. Has it improved substantially since then? If so, I might try again.

FreeDOS was the first non-commercial OS I tried, back when I was in Year 12 at school. I was looking for an OS for my 486, so I type "Free Operating System" into my Web Browser. There were all of these references to something called "Linux." I investigated it a little and heard it was a clone of Unix, which I had never used and I had read (in a school textbook) was extremely difficult to use and was only operated by engineers!

It was another two years before I decided to investigate that Linux thing again...

I belived so mutch in this OS that i still have the _ORIGINAL_ OS/2 2.1 and i recently bought "OS/2 for Windows".
I also started a petition (www.petitiononline/OS24FREE) to ask IBM to open source it, but there are mutch licensing problems... Anyway i hope to see osFree grow !

The one thing that stands out from this project is that instead of complaining about IBM not open sourcing OS/2, this group has made a huge effort in solving the problem. If only other groups that yearn for their favourite OS to be open sourced would take a page from this group's book. Haiku is another great example of a group getting off their laurells and making a real contribution to the community.

I know that the reactos project intend to add other compatiblity layers other than just Win32, and I'm sure they'd welcome volunteers to work on an OS/2 subsystem. *perhaps* their efforts might be more worthwhile there?

Perhaps it could be done but for me, the brilliance of OS/2 was the OS and the GUI itself rather than any app in particular. It would be a LOT of effort required just get a couple of nice apps running.

I believe ReactOS does use Freeloader, yes, however, to develop an OS compatability layer, this would be insignificant. You would be writing code which talks directly with the kernel and other OS subsystems I guess.

In any case, I am not critical of there efforts, as I have great admeration for people who can write an OS from scratch.

How are they going to license their own stuff then? They have their own OSFree license (3 clause BSD like) ReactOS is GPL, then there are significant parts under a license called 4OS2, they want their stuff to be based on L4 (I assume Pistachio) so add 2 clause BSD license. Then there is REXXUTIL.DLL that they label as being MPL. Damn that's a hodgepodge!

maybe some banks that get tired of windows will use osFree when they get to the level. As I understand it banks used to use alot of os/2.
So is the osFree team using FreeDOS for the dos compatability?
Glad to hear ReactOS is teaming with these folks

Hmmm haven't visited the freeOS site in quite a while and actually I thing that Apple is on the right path using a freeBSD userland - a successor doesn't need to run legacy applications native (Look at Vista that runs them in a VM).

I must say to the FreeOS crowd - BRAVO - WELL DONE - KEEP IT UP. You've made it to the first milestone, that has enabled you to show something to the masses.

I must say that I fell in love with the WPS/PMShell back in 1992 with OS/2 2.0 - It was chunky, lazy, not really 100% stable, massive, and partly 16-bit. With Enterprise, Merlin and Aurora the stability and ressource overhead has come under control - IMO the latest snapshot isn't much more ressource demanding than the old 2.0. Actually this post is written using FF 1.5 B3 on an eComstation 1.2 (based on OS/2 4.52+) - I've got the applications I need to perform my tasks and am really looking forward to the arrival of OO.O 2.x in Q1 next year.